Join Us

Voice for Equality: Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is an American writer, political scientist and an Associate Professor of Politics and African American studies at Princeton University. She grew up in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Chester with a black father, the dean of Afro-American affairs at the University of Virginia; and a white mother, who taught at a community college and worked for nonprofits that helped poor communities. “I’ve never thought of myself as biracial,” Harris-Lacewell says. “I’m black.” She is the author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought on the methods African Americans use to develop political ideas through ordinary conversations in places like barbershops, churches, and popular culture. Harris-Lacewell's writings have been published in The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Crain's Chicago Business and Newsday. She regularly provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC, and has contributed to other television and print sources. Learn more here.

In a piece she wrote for The Nation in October 2009, Ms. Harris-Lacewell stated:

Today, many same-sex couples in the United States live in a fraught, contingent space of loving attachment, unprotected by state recognition. My fierce commitment to marriage equality derives, in part, from my personal biography as an interracial child, descended from American slaves, and raised in Virginia, beginning less than a decade after the Loving decision. Even though I am heterosexual, marriage equality is personal. I learn from the history of racial and interracial marriage exclusion that the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples is wrong. [Link]

Freedom to Marry salutes Melissa Harris-Lacewell as a Voice for Equality! Learn about other Voices for Equality here.